Arundhati Virmani (dir.), Political Aesthetics. Culture, critique and the everyday

Conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of symbolic representation – an introduction

“…Seeing ceremony and rituals as performances allows us to reflect on the importance of political aesthetics (Bleiker and Hutchinson 2014;Rai 2010;Virmani 2016): What do public buildings attempt to project? Why are they decorated the way they are?…”

“…Representation is about claim-making (Saward 2010), but we need to understand how these representative claims are made and what makes them legitimate; we cannot simply read these off from institutional practices and norms. Contestations over the aesthetics of politicsflags, songs, buildings, paintings, statuesare all important clues for our study of politics (Virmani 2016). For example, in post-independence India the state's claim to authority was not only made through declaring statehood, writing a constitution, or securing borders.…”